Historical Horror for the Haunting Season

In an alternate 16th century England, a young girl is given a life sentence as a sin eater. For the crime of stealing bread, she will forever be shunned by society as a woman who eats ritual foods symbolizing the sins of the dead. Apprenticed to an older sin eater, May must make her way in a cruel world that refuses to acknowledge or speak to her. But when her mentor is tortured and killed, she is drawn into a deadly royal plot and must turn the very role that has been used to subjugated her into her power.

Master of historical horror and gothic literature, Sarah Water’s paints a chilling ghost story in The Little Stranger. A rural doctor is called to look in on a family living in an old Georgian home falling into ruins. They’re certainly haunted by something, but it is merely a dying way of life in postwar England, or something altogether more sinister? Creepy and atmospheric, this novel is a great example of gothic horror.

As an escaped slave, Seethe has found freedom. But she’s never truly free from the past. Haunted by memories of her early years at Sweet Home where she experienced so many horrors, she struggles to stay in the present. The present, though, is filled with its own hauntings, especially that of her baby, dead and nameless, and the teenage girl who shows up claiming to bear the only name on her lost child’s tombstone: Beloved.

This gothic masterpiece set in 1950s Mexico follows a woman venturing out to an isolated town to discover the cause of her cousin’s strange and disturbing letters. What she finds is a family shrouded in mystery, a house full of horrors, and a reality almost too terrible to be believed. It’s a strange and chilling tale that will suck you in a spit you back out again.

This Victorian ghost story tells a chilling tale of a pregnant widow sent to her late husband’s crumbling country estate where she finds herself surrounded by resentful servants and hostile villagers. Her only companion is a painted wooden figurine, one that looks shockingly like Elsie herself. The residents of the estate are terrified off the figure, but she believes that to be nothing more than superstition. That is, until she notices its eyes beginning to follow her around the room.